Drawing on disorder: How viruses use histone mimicry to their advantage

Tarakhovsky, Alexander; Prinjha, Rab K.

The H3N2 subtype of influenza is the predominant carrier of the histone H3K4-like sequence, whereas tails of NS1 proteins from other influenza subtypes (Bao et al., 2008) either display no recognizable motifs or possess highly specific motifs, such as PDZ ligand (PL) motifs (Obenauer et al., 2006; Jackson et al., 2008; Thomas et al., 2011) or SUMOylation sequences, as found within the NS1 tail of the H1N1 (1918) strain (Santos et al., 2013) . This NS1 tail diversity may contribute to unique features of the individual virus subtypes. The PL motifs ESEV and EPEV within the NS1 tails of avian-derived influenza strains have been associated with highly pathogenic human isolates such as H5N1 (Obenauer et al., 2006; Jackson et al., 2008; Thomas et al., 2011) . These PL motifs enable viruses to attenuate apoptotic death of the infected cells, thus increasing the viral load (Golebiewski et al., 2011) .